


Eclipse

by elmathelas



Category: Lord of the Rings RPF
Genre: Filming, Friendship, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-06-21
Updated: 2013-06-21
Packaged: 2017-12-15 16:37:18
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,610
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/851677
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/elmathelas/pseuds/elmathelas
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Billy Boyd sometimes has to be told where to look.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Eclipse

**Author's Note:**

> Beta by Pippinmctaggart. Originally posted to Livejournal July, 2004.

1973

The crinkle of their winter jackets, a strong arm holding him up, winter air cold in his nose. His hands tucked into the sleeves of his own jacket, face leaning against his father’s shoulder. And his father’s voice, rumbling through bone to his ears.

“You must look just there, Billy.” A hand pointing to a place several degrees beyond the sun. “Just there, and you’ll see it alright.” His father’s face in full when he turns to look his young son in the eye. “Don’t look at the sun, remember that.”

Billy nods as his father looks back towards the sky. It’s Christmas Eve, early afternoon. So far the day has been a flurry of excitement on the part of the children and frayed nerves on the part of his mother, and now this, the rare treat of being alone with his father. On an adventure, standing at the boundary of their neighborhood where it seems to melt into a strip of empty lots, looking into the sky with the other gathered neighbors. People don’t speak, in the cold, they just watch the sky.

They watch as the shadow covers the neighborhood, far faster than any sunset and too early by hours. The sun’s image fades to a green blob in the corner of his eye, and though he can see the dark circle it’s not clear. Billy takes a deep breath, steels himself, and looks—not at the sun but at a man standing several paces off. The man seems to be looking at the sun itself, and yet he is unharmed.

Billy looks up. The black circle, the shadow of the moon between the sun and the earth, is clear, now, though frosted over with the green of persistence of vision. Yet around the edges the sun shines with what seems to be even more force, no longer a thin winter light, but a ring of flame surrounding the dark void at the center. He stares with an open mouth until his father glances over, realizes what he’s doing. His father’s open hand pushes at his face, forceful but far softer than any slap, and Billy shrieks, realizing what he’s done, and buries his head in the fabric at his father’s shoulder.

A kindly voice asking him what is wrong, telling him not to be afraid, and the soft chuckles of the neighbors near him, thinking he’s only being a silly child, oh Billy, what an imagination he has. The fabric is cool against his closed eyes, which feel hot. His mother had warned him, warned him that if he looked the sun, even hidden, would burn his eyes and he would see no more, ever again. He cries into the fabric, mourning his moment of temptation that was not thwarted, fearing his father’s sadness and anger when he finds out.

“Billy, why did you look?” His father’s hand is there again, feeling cool against his flushed skin. He tries to resist it but his father is turning his face away from the coat, and he reluctantly opens his eyes, fearing above all else that first moment without sight, more even than all that will come after it. But his father’s face is there, only clouded a bit with the green spots that are already fading. His father cups his chin firmly, and Billy looks back at him. “Why do you always have to look?”

 

1999

The meetings always end in a kind of chaos, and while most days he’d join in with whatever game Elijah and Dom have on at the moment, right now he just wants to go home. The last useful bits of conversation seem to be happening across the table, almost out of his range of hearing, but he can’t exactly walk out while everyone is still there, even if Dom and Elijah are mainly just running around playing something that seems to be a rough blending of cup and jai alai.

Then someone is saying his name, it’s Fran, and she’s gesturing to him. He walks over to her side of the table, taking care not to upset the cups of coffee, juice, water, and tea that line the edge. She clears a space while she’s talking to the man beside her, Paul, from the art department, then turns to Billy.

“Paul brought over the sketches I wanted to show you, of what the palantir will look like on film.”

“Ah. Good.” Billy nods but really he’s a bit annoyed. To him the palantir has always been something singularly attractive and frightening at the same time. He had imagined it as something like the slick of colour on a soap bubble, enticing and unreliable both, teasing the eye and daring it to try and find one hue or shape to hold on to. He knew that wasn’t how Tolkien had intended it, but it had worked for him, so far, in his own imagination of what it was that Pippin found so irresistible, what it was that would have made it physically painful not to seek it out.

Pippin’s desire to see it, so great that he would knowingly deceive Gandalf, had to be a kind of pain, greater than simple hunger or desire. It couldn’t be mere need. It had to be need so great that the empty space inside filled with an ache that wasn’t satisfying. But the ache would fill in the edges so he’d know just how big the need really was, and how good the satisfaction was going to be, how much better than the ache.

Billy trains his face to a look of neutral interest, determined to be polite, professional, and looks to where Paul was laying out several large sheets of paper.

The drawings have been done in pastel, then fixed to the paper, but it looks as though the oils might start moving again at any moment. The palantir is shown in several lights, but all showed the swirling colors, though not as a pale or even oily rainbow, but more as flames just beneath the surface of the stone. It’s an eerie variation on the theme he’s already half imagined and as he turns page after page over it seems that the colors do swirl in the late afternoon light.

Elijah, having snuck up behind him, seems to have the same idea. He reaches towards the pile, his arm insinuating itself between Billy’s arm and his side, and riffles at the thick pages.

“Is it like a flip book?” He has to stand on his toes to see around Billy, and this makes it easy for Dom to knock him off balance when he comes tearing around the corner of the table, brandishing an empty cup.

“No Elijah, it is not a flip book,” Billy says, turning in dismay as their roughhousing knocks the lion’s share of the pages to the floor.

Elijah and Dom nearly knock heads stooping to pick them up, Paul waves their concern away, but Billy hardly takes any of that in. One picture is left on the table, a rendering of the first time the eye of Sauron appears clearly in the palantir. The curve of the sphere distorts the cat’s eye shape, and the fiery iris is stretched to nearly a ring. Billy traces his finger along the edge, defining the eye, the shadow his hand casts on the black part invisible for the dark color there.

Paul is standing beside him, tucking the other pages back in the portfolio, but he is silent, unhurried. It’s Dom who wants to hurry, to get away. He jogs by again, inadvertently crashing into Billy again, shoulder jarring into the space between his shoulder blades so that the wind is nearly knocked out of him.

Instead of stepping away Dom slings an arm over Billy’s shoulders, and hugs him close, as if the embrace can take away the indignity of the injury faster than simply walking away could.

“What are you looking at Bills?” he asks, and Billy has the irrational urge to cover it up, as if Dom might see everything in it that he does, not just an artist’s idea of an eye looking through black stone, but the green hue that comes with persistence of vision. Dom might see that he feels the sharp tingling in his nose as if from winter air, the assurance of another person close enough to hold him up. He blinks, not realizing, at first, that the last one isn’t a product of his imagination. Dom tightens his arm, leans closer and peers around him. “Let me have a look.”

 

2000

It’s not easy, sometimes, to see Dom through Merry. Billy has no illusions as to the fact that he is not Pippin, and some days he feels like Billy Boyd is shining a little too clearly through the make-up and the wig, that he can’t construct the demeanor that the hobbit requires. It’s only made more difficult by the fact that he’s twisted his shoulder, damn near thrown his back out, actually, from writhing around on the floor of the set holding the palantir. He sits against a pillar, one of the excellently warm blankets propping him forward while he rests a frozen gel pack against the muscle he’s hoping is merely strained. The palantir is heavy, no worse than a shot put, but he’d been too far gone into Pippin’s mind, too deep into looking into the swirling flame and feeling the thing itself control him, and he’d gone and fooled his very body. Slumping against the pillar, looking feeling every single day of every single one of his years, he watches Dom carry him a sandwich and a cup of coffee, and has a brief moment of dissociation from reality, where he wonders how a hobbit has come by a Styrofoam cup.

“They’ll have a fit if you spill this,” Dom warns as he sinks down beside Billy.

“So I won’t spill.” He’s still testy from the pain, and he’d been unwilling to move far from Pippin’s sleeping bag.

“Good news though.” Dom is looking at his own sandwich as he speaks, not at Billy, and it doesn’t seem so surprising then that Billy should see him as a hobbit even when they’re not working. “Pete just wants to get my dialogue done this afternoon. You don’t have to wrestle that thing again. Just lie there looking all scared.”

Billy relaxes a little. It was just the outcome he’d been hoping for. When he relaxes though his knee bumps into Dom’s leg, but neither of them move. It’s cool on the set, and in moments Billy can feel the warmth of Dom’s skin seeping through to his own. It’s nice, having someone else so near, especially Dom. Billy opens his mouth to speak, to say just that, and then snaps it shut, wishing he could, even privately, blame that moment of insanity on the mild painkiller they’d given him.

Billy lies on the ground, covered in a combination of fake sweat and his own perspiration, trying to channel the twinge and throb in his shoulder into the proper expression of fear and guilt. Dom leans over him, no, it’s Merry, more so now than when Billy had looked up to see him bringing lunch, and there is only one phrase that Merry speaks to Pippin now—“Why do you always have to look?”

Behind Merry, Pete is nothing but an indistinct figure who will never been seen by any who might see this clip later, and he speaks softly, one word, over and over—again, again, again, directing the hobbit to interrogate his cousin until the words are nearly free of meaning.

 

2001  
Billy leans back, one hand curled loosely around a cold glass, the other curled gently around the edge of the bench seat. He’s looking out at the dance floor, at the bodies that move so free and fast they almost seem to whirl, and every now and then he catches a glimpse of them. Dom and Orlando, dancing among but not with the other people. Unlike most of the couples they’re actually touching, hands resting on each others’ hips, first both of Orlando’s hands, fingertips barely brushing denim, then Dom, reaching out with one hand and leaning away at the same time. They’re like planets, whirling, moving freely yet destroying nothing. It’s not the sight of them that makes his mouth dry. It’s only Dom.

He looks down when he drinks, the moisture in his mouth gone as soon as it’s there. And he resolves not to bring his eyes to them again.

In the absence of sight it is his imagination that takes over, and he tries to decide what it was they looked like. The word comes to him, suddenly, and it’s a word Dom taught him. Astrojax. A kind of yo-yo with three spheres—the merest, most rudimentary flick of the wrist keeping two of them revolving around a third, stationary one. They seem to spin out of control on their nylon cord, yet they always spin back to where they began, and Billy has, on the long breaks between their interviews and while waiting for their flights, actually performed tricks with them without meaning to. But yes, he thinks, that’s what Dom and Orlando reminded him of. That magical illusion, gravity holding sway on something that seemed that it should, by rights, careen out of control. He keeps looking at the table, not at all sure that he’s not seeing them out of the corner of his eye, despite his best intentions. It’s not voyeuristic, he tries to tell himself. They’re not a couple. They only dance like that for the sheer reckless joy of it, for the sensation of flying, and Billy is only rightly enjoying the sight of them spinning around among bodies like something that should have far less form than it does.

Ian catches his eye, sitting just across the table from him.

“Go on then,” he says, his voice quiet but careful, full of intent.

“With what?” Billy raises his eyes so that it is only Ian he sees.

Ian reaches out so slowly that Billy isn’t sure, even when Ian is touching the side of his face, that Ian really means to touch him. But there is a smooth warm hand against his cheek, and he allows his face to be turned.

Dom is visible, now, and Orlando has gone. There is nothing holding Dom in orbit, nothing at all except his own legs, and his arms, now lifted just over his head, his hands close together. Billy stares, the strange sensation of Ian’s hand against his cheek making him feel safe and hidden, that and the fact that Dom’s eyes are closed.

“What is it you want me to do?” Billy asks, his face moving against Ian’s hand. He takes a drink and wonders when Ian is going to let go. As soon as he does, Billy is going to turn away from this sight of Dom. But then Dom opens his eyes, and stares at Billy, still moving.

“Just look, Billy,” Ian says. His voice is so kind and fond that it would raise a lump in Billy’s throat, were it not for the different kind of thickness that lodged there as soon as Dom had looked his way. Dom’s arms are still raised, but only slightly now, as if he’s waiting for something to fall from the sky, rather than reaching for it. Billy finds he’s leaning on Ian’s hand now, for support, or encouragement, or something else. “Just take a good look.”


End file.
